


It Must Needs Be

by SteelBlaidd



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Gen, Godwin was here, Opposition in ALL things, hidden darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27379435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SteelBlaidd/pseuds/SteelBlaidd
Summary: "Don't you ever get tired of playing the game?”“Oh, I could never be tired of playing with yo~u Sugarcube,” Plagg caroled as he did slow flips over the other kwami. “Why? Are you tired?”“Yes,” she exploded and flopped back into a spread-eagled heap. “Everything that gets created eventually falls apart.”
Relationships: Plagg & Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 23
Collections: Miraculous Fanworks Anniversary 2020





	It Must Needs Be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Master_Spoiler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Master_Spoiler/gifts).



> Written in celebration of the First Anniversary of the [Miraculous Fanworks Discord](https://discord.gg/XR6UHT) without which I would not be the author I am today, nor the one I hope to be tomorrow.
> 
> Written to a prompt proposed anonymously and selected with out knowledge by the writer of the recipient.
> 
> I'm sure Maspers will find the result hilarious.

As Plagg curled up for a brief nap in the Miracle Box off to the side of where the other kwami gathered together, he heard Tikki let out a huge sigh. He cracked one eye open and watched as his counterpart flopped on her back in the midst of their piled treasures.

_ This looks fun _ , he thought and floated up from his nest of ancient gym socks to ease up to the recumbent avatar of creation.

“Awww, what's wrong Sugarcube?” he asked in his most deliberately irritating whine. 

Tikki raised an eyebrow at him and in a voice larded with cynicism replied, “Is that a real question, Stinky Sock? Or are you just trying to make trouble?” 

“Now, now, Sugarcube, when have I ever been anything less than sincere and helpful? I am a very simple and straightforward kwami, after all.” 

Tikki gave him the hairy eyeball for another few seconds then rolled over to face away from him. 

“I don’t think you would want to help anyway, but don't you ever get tired of playing the game?”

“Oh, I could never be tired of playing with yo~u Sugarcube,” Plagg caroled as he did slow flips over the other kwami. “Why? Are  _ you _ tired?” 

“Yes,” she exploded and flopped back into a spread-eagled heap. “Everything that gets created eventually falls apart.” Her stare was accusatory now. 

“Now that's not fair, it's not like it's my fault.“ Tikki glared harder. ”Well, not all the time.” 

“Often enough!'' Tikki sat up in huff and turned to sit facing away from Plagg, arms folded. “I still haven't forgiven you for the dinosaurs.”

“Well, I said I was sorry, didn't I?” Plagg pleaded insincerely.

“Not sorry enough,” she shot back.

_ Not sorry at all is more like it. _ Plagg buried that particular thought behind an ingratiating smile. The lumbering lizards were wonderful in their capacity for destruction, but they were a dead end. They ruled the earth for millions of years and hardly anything changed.

The bigger they got the harder it was to move, the patterns of life settled into one of those stagnant equilibriums that Tikki so loved. Everything  _ just so _ . Lush but static. Nothing actually happening! The illusion of life but in the end it was like one of those real big ones,  _ sauropods  _ he thought humans were calling them, with the head so far from the body you could kill it at one end and the other end wouldn't notice for almost a minute. 

Humans were much more interesting. Always changing, always learning, always breaking something.  _ Hacking _ , Plagg thought they called it these days. They hacked milk and mold and created that most wonderful of things,  _ cheese.  _ Milk  _ reaching  _ for immortality. Reaching, but never quite getting there. It was the reaching that was important.

His philosophical musings were interrupted by Tikki’s petulant accusation. “And I don't believe you when you say Atlantis was an accident either!” 

“Fine, don’t believe me. Doesn't change the truth,” he shot back. The truth was that it  _ had  _ been an accident, sort of. He was only trying to help his holder deal with a particularly nasty suitor, not blow up the whole island. But these things happened. And the things those Atlantians learned spread with the refugees, so it wasn't a total loss. They just didn't get to be in charge for as long as Tikki hoped.

Pisa, now that was a purely useless event, miss and cataclysm one tiny foundation stone and the whole thing starts to sag. 

“Arrghg! Pla~gg!” Tikki whined. “Why do you have to keep breaking things?! I get everything all set up and running and you have to come tromping through like an elephant through a china shop!” 

“Now where's the fun in that? You get everything all so sticky sweet like it’s covered in a mile of honey and it all stops  _ moving. _ ” It made Plagg’s tongue curdle just thinking about all that sweetness. And all the poor dead microbes that could have helped make delightfully stinky cheese.

“One of these days I'm going to figure out a way to fix things so you can’t mess it up anymore,” she grumped.

Plagg smiled with all his teeth. “You can sure try Sugarcube. It will be fun to watch.” And it would be. His Lady could be sooo creative. Pulling remarkable things into existence with her stubborn will. Crafting phenomenal towers of interlocking people, environments and behaviors in her quest to create the perfect eternal solution to the painful consequences of life. That's part of what made them so fun to knock down. To poke at the weak spots. To find the hidden places where corruption would creep in, so he could burn it out. 

It was a surprisingly easy job, which was why Plagg liked it. He could just wait and eat cheese, marvelous invention, until a fatal flaw manifested itself, and then give it a little nudge.

Not that it wasn't fun to let loose every once in a while, but that was always risky. You get rid of the bad stuff, mostly, but so much of the great things would get spoiled too. Dealing with the funny German fellow with the mustache was one of those times. 

Plagg mourned the 3500 English farmhouse cheeses culled to a mere 100 by rationing. Tikki was more upset about all the burnt art and smashed buildings, but there's no accounting for taste. They agreed that the people were the biggest loss. Without them who would make the cheese.

Poor Tikki, she had such high hopes for him, and that other big thinker, the one with the big boring book, that thought if you just made everyone exactly the same everything would be just perfect and there would be bread in every cupboard and unicorns and rainbows would dance through the streets. After Fu had to go run and hide from the results of those two brainstorms butting up against each other, she had sulked in the box for a decade. 

Plagg thought leaving Marianne had been Fu’s biggest mistake. Humans did better when they had people to talk to. Especially ones who could both love and disagree with them. She would have made a good Bug, too. And she gave the best ear scritches.

Tikki had tried to inspire so many would-be saviors. Encourage them in their grand ideas of how, if only you could arrange things  _ ju~st right _ , everything would be perfect. Every time she tried, just like Procrustes’ bed, the rack and the knife were inevitable.

It would only work if living things were actually the machines these architects of Utopia had tried to treat them as. You couldn't just  _ make  _ people brave, or kind, or generous. Not any more than you could wave a wand and make them taller, or skinnier, or fatter for that matter. You had to grow them that way, like a good blue, and the only way to do that was to give them opportunities to be cowardly, or mean, or selfish. 

It was a delicious irony that the harder you pushed to  _ make  _ people be good the faster all their bad qualities came out. Hardly gave him any work at all. Though, like that horrible processed American stuff, some of the experiments could take a while to show that they had gone bad. 

Struggle was what made strength.

Tikki  _ knew  _ that, but she would get so impatient with all the hurting sometimes and there was always a new crop of idealists that thought you could take a shortcut to “heaven on earth” over the bodies of people who thought or lived differently. 

Plagg zipped out of the Miracle Box and came back with a cookie. And a wedge of Camembert.

“Hey, Sugarcube. It’ll be OK.” He poked her with the sweet, crumbly disk. “You have a really good Bug and if anyone can inspire people to be better it's Pigtails.”

Tikki sniffed then sat up to take her treat. “You think so?” she asked as she took a melancholy mouthful.

“Of course,” He tossed his own treat into his mouth and swallowed. “My kitten doesn't call her his ‘Everyday Ladybug’ for nothing.” 

And as she pushed forward, inspiring people to think and speak and do and  _ be  _ a little better, he and his kitten would be there to keep her safe, and help clean up the messes new creation always left in its wake.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is taken from [2 Nephi 2:11-12](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/2-ne/2.p11-p12#p11)
> 
> 11 For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.
> 
> 12 Wherefore, it must needs have been created for a thing of naught; wherefore there would have been no purpose in the end of its creation. ...
> 
> As ever, my great gratitude to my betas [sagansjagger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagansjagger) and [MiniNoire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniNoire/pseuds/MiniNoire) and all the rest of the _Fabulous_ people at the [, who have encouraged me and kept me going. If you write or draw for this fandom, or just want to, come play with us.](https://discord.gg/mlfanworks)


End file.
